With a few notable exceptions, I did not enjoy schooling. Primary school almost knocked the joy out of learning for me. Almost, thankfully. Because my desire to learn won over some bumpy teaching experiences.

I am not alone in this. We enter life filled with curiosity and soon have our hand straight up from the desire to learn. Good luck plays a part in helping us keep that fire burning over the years.

When I first came to the U.S. I was working with children, and I am still reminded of how enjoyable it was to explore new topics together. Never once have I been afraid of coming across someone who would surprise me with substance and inventiveness.

Learning new things is one of the pillars of satisfying life. Referenced early in the podcast are Randy Pausch, who taught at Carnegie Mellon, and the 10,000 hours of practice rule for mastery introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers (synopsis here.)

Why 10,000?

Kaufman and Ferriss are aligned in debunking it along similar philosophies vs. others:

you can go up the learning curve really fast, and it's not just because of talent, but because of all these other factors of knowing how to learn.

The role of inspiration, the role of active learning strategies, and things of that nature.

In other words, it's not just about talent. It is possible to accelerate learning by using certain techniques.

Techniques for learning

Ferriss mentions:

a number of factors and they have a lot of interplay... inspiration, drive, intrinsic motivation, reward, and punishment, and extrinsic motivation, punishment, and reward

When explaining the things that he did, going from not knowing how to do something like swimming to mastering it, he highlights some techniques:

Look at assumptions

For example, examining best practices more closely and using experiments to find methods that work better for you.

Asking “what if?” questions helps here, as in “what if I had to eliminate this?”“what if I did the opposite of this?”

Experimenting is a good way to debunk myths and challenge assumptions successfully especially when looking at larger goals -- like learning a new language -- that might seem a bit daunting.

Find people to emulate

Ferriss says that the best performers are not always the best teachers particularly because they have been doing it for thirty or forty years.

So you want to find someone who had made the most progress in a period of say 6 months or 12 months. See who has done something you want to do over a defined period of time, then reach out to them.

A tip to find those people is to search for “controversial” such and such -- i.e. coach -- on Google.

An example close to home, is asking someone who is a native English speaker to take the TOEFL test#, they might flunk it. I actually studied for it, and know it is hard. I had to break down the learning process and consciously think about it because I learned English later in life.

Use feedback - both self-generated, and from others

For the self-generated feedback, Ferriss says:

spot trends and associations in what you do, write things down, and know what you are trying to measure

As for accepting the feedback of others, he says:

get the why, not just the how

Which makes perfect sense. I will add that you should be picking people who care enough to give you useful data points, as in based on what you are measuring and decide how to filter the feedback.

Accelerating learning

Ferriss says:

you can become fluent in any language in six months... the vast majority of people can

And I know this to be true, even in shorter times if you are already bilingual. What he's talking about is accelerating through the slow slug of starting to learn something as depicted in the learning curve below.

Clearly, learning a language is a lifelong pursuit -- think about how much reading and writing accomplished authors continue to do. Using good techniques can speed the process up. The philosophy of Ferriss' entire body of work is based on this concept, to get people through to the hockey stick, so that they can

get to the top 5% of the population in 6-12 months

Kathy Sierra talks about how to design products for the context and to make it easy for them to get through the first steps in the path in order to motivate people to stick with learning. Part of her new book Badass: Making Users Awesome is a step by step tutorial to get someone from zero to meaningful in as painless a way as possible.

Adults can learn languages faster than children, says Ferriss. Based on everything he's seen and read.

The reason they typically don't is because they have mortgages, and jobs, and obligations... and it's an option whether they choose to study or not.

Children have no choice and no other obligations. One data point I would like to offer here is that a child's brain is also in a different stage of development#, where languages get plugged into it as the more sophisticated cortical levels of the brain are forming.

When it comes to examining peak performance, says Ferriss:

it is very dangerous to focus on averages and exclude outliers.

It is good to conduct research and identify examples that are out of the norm.

Using technology for learning

Technology can help scale learning. Two tools Ferriss mentioned specifically for the study of languages because he has been involved with the companies as investor are:

Duolingo -- a free language tool for the Web, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone. I used it briefly to work on French, however found the system a little buggy. I do believe in the power of digital tool as a complement to our desire to learn, so will give it another try

No Red Ink -- a tool that helps students improve grammar/writing skills using their personal interests, adaptive learning, tutorials, & color-coded heat maps - the ability to create content that appeals to the interest of students is a good value proposition

A couple of months back at a Google #firestarters event on creativity in a constrained world I also learned about the work of Dr. Louise Waters, Superintendent & CEO, Leadership Public Schools (@Leadps). At the event, she talked about how the Oakland School District managed to help students help themselves to their eduction with the help of an ExitTicket, and app that provides personalized intervention and differentiation for every student, every class. Some of the things she said resonate with this conversation:

“Constraints help you think: Instead of doing more (remediation), what can we do with less? (using students clicking)”

“We needed a faster solution, in the moment feedback to build their confidence.”

Living a good life

Creative people have messy minds, says Kaufman:

because they have visibility to inhabit seemingly contradictory traits in one. Creative people are good at quickly switching between different personality dimensions.

Which brings the conversation to the idea of wanting to maximize life. And having good reflection and following feedback wards people who are naturally wired for achievement to also embrace conscious appreciation of how far they have come.

In addition to achievement, the pillars of a good life, says Kaufman, are engagement as in living in the present, meaning, and (conscious) appreciation. Together, they convey a deeper sense of wellbeing.

We are called to make decisions all the time -- both in our personal lives and at work. The problem is that typically we are often in a hurry and thus under psychological stress and unable to consider more options, and grappling with a complex issue and thus our cognitive load or the total amount of our mental effort being used in the working memory is depleted.

Add to that incentives and you see why we come to regret so many decisions that seemed to be good idea when we made them. We should Think Twice, say Michael J. Mauboussin [h/t Shane Parrish]. Harnessing the power of counter intuition can serve you well, especially in the long run, which is where poor decisions' tail reaches.

Tunnel vision is one of the many traps we fall into because we may mistake it for focus. In the book, Mauboussin suggests a five-point checklist to avoid this trap:

1. Explicitly consider alternatives.

[...] negotiation teachers suggest entering talks with your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, your walkaway price, and the same two sums for the party across the table.

2. Seek dissent.

[...] ask questions that could elicit answers that might contradict your own views. The listen carefully to the answers. Do the same with data: look for reliable sources that offer conclusions different than yours.

3. Keep track of previous decisions.

[...] once an event has passed, we believe we knew more about the outcome beforehand than we really did. [...] A decision-making journal is a cheap and easy routine to offset hindsight bias and encourage a fuller view of possibilities.

4. Avoid making decisions while at emotional extremes.

[...] Stress, anger, fear, anxiety, greed, and euphoria [...] but also the absence of emotion.

5. Understand incentives.

[...] Financial incentives are generally easy to spot, but nonfinancial incentives, like reputation or fairness, are less obvious, yet still important in driving decisions. While few of us believe that incentives distort our decisions, the evidence shows that the effect can be subconscious.

Chip and Dan Heath provide some ideas and examples on how to widen options, the first of the four villains of decision-making they tackle in Decisive. They suggest using reframing as a technique. For example:

the question a college-bound senior should be asking, is not “what's the highest-ranking college I can convince to take me?” Rather, it should be “what do I want out of life, and what are the best options to get me there?” Those two questions are in no way synonymous, and once families start thinking about the latter one, they often find that they have many more good options than they ever thought possible.

Another angle that often goes unexplored is the opportunity cost. Yes and no answers can hide alternatives. For example, we can create opportunity in a buy an item vs. not buy the item binary choice by including the item's price. What else can we do with that amount?

Having options is such a deeply rooted aspect of American culture -- and one would argue of modern-day expectations in many Western areas of the world. We should endeavor to make good use of it by creating better choices for ourselves, alternatives worthy of action.

I've used this quote in my talk on influence at SxSWi, and again at SMX this past year for good reason -- we are still enamored with technology for its own sake and miss the greater opportunity, which is that of creating experiences worth having. As in “What kind of world am I trying to create?

Then, “So how do I get the technology to do that?” In other words, the technology is not valuable until you figure out the kind of impact you want to have.

The quote is from an interview published by MIT in its magazine and it contains more good thoughts for businesses. Schrage outlines three things companies need to get good at:

1. experiment by crafting good business hypotheses

“The cost of experimentation is now the same or less than the cost of analysis. You can get more value for time, more value for dollar, more value for euro, from doing a quick experiment than from doing a sophisticated analysis. In fact, your quick experiment can make your sophisticated analysis better.”

2. promote greater collaboration, interaction, and diversity

“not politically correct diversity, but diversity of skills and points of view.”

3. think more clearly about innovation

“It's no longer about creating new features and functionality. We have to move away from the notion of innovation being about greater creation of choice. Instead, it's about greater value from use.”

It seems fairly obvious that companies should be thinking about innovation as in greater value. Schrage answers the question of incentive:

“So often, when companies sell a product or a service, they don't look at how it's used. General Motors [Co.], until it started having OnStar, didn't care how people were driving.”

The greater cost today might be that of not experimenting, or ignoring or not seeking information on how value gets destroyed and things go unrealized. A better question is whether this is because of technology being too expensive (to buy, implement, and train teams), or culture driving the narrow set of choices.

The full interview is worth reading. It was published in 2010. Much of it still holds true.

A book that teaches you something different, that literally rewires your operating system is worth holding on to, because you have the opportunity to build those ideas into your own actions.

Tharp explains how she develops her work from the spine, which she defines as the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. From this definition I wish we had more spine and fewer statements in our work lives. Because this is the structure she uses to draw intention -- the audience may infer it or not.

In other words, this is your private tool to answer one key question -- What am I trying to say?

We talk about attention a lot in business circles, yet there is another element of engagement that we overlook. That is energy. Both energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important, says Tharp. Economy of purpose and execution is an actionable way to think about simplicity.

I found the section on metaphor in the exercises section of the chapter useful. You will likely do as well.

What is your Metaphor Quotient?

Tharp says that developing a spine is the first step in building your metaphor quotient, the creative process own IQ. Comparing is the engine that drives metaphor. Her exercises (abbreviated/edited):

1. Visual translation -- note how many images and objects you see in three minutes of cloud-gazing.

2. Metaphor as object or task -- try to find a rhythm of the process while doing a mindless chore like washing the dishes. Hum it, name it, then find other chores/tasks with a similar rhythm.

4. Metaphor as faith -- what images come to mind when focusing on superstition like knocking on wood to bring luck?

5. Metaphor as theater -- by studying a word's linguistic roots trace how far it takes you. She uses the example of the word tragedy... and how that makes her think of goats. You will figure out why if you do the exercise.

6. Metaphor as curating -- find works of art you can connect together. They are more mundane items, I've been doing this by cataloging my Sunday links under themes (for example how to conquer information overload.)

7. Metaphor as empathy -- by turning Narcissus around and try to see another person in your image.

All those comparing images for differences in objects exercises in the crossword puzzles do pay off.

Making Sense:

Rewarding patience over laziness in social experiments and weaving engineering into cartoons both lead to surprising results.

The button: the fascinating social experiment driving Reddit crazy. Vox: These colored badges have created a virtual status hierarchy. Within the /r/thebutton community, lower numbers are more prestigious. Only a few people have had the patience and good luck to snag coveted yellow flair indicating a timer below 31 seconds. There are also believed to be orange and red flair for when the timer gets below 21 and 11 seconds, respectively, but no one has actually gotten this flair yet.

Inside the whimsical but surprisingly dark world of Rube Goldberg machines. The Verge: The machines were symbols, Goldberg wrote, of "man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results." The early 20th century was a time of great technological upheaval — inventions of unprecedented complexity were introduced to the world as novelties and quickly became ubiquitous. [...]The mechanisms of our world are not necessarily any more efficient than they’ve ever been; they’re just more obscure, hidden in the invisible digital distance behind our screens.

Making Do:

How we spend our days ends up being how we spend our lives. Understanding the difference between practice and deliberate practice makes a difference in learning.

Charted: How history’s most creative people organized their days. The Washington Post: Want to develop a better work routine?[...] Some of the differences in creative schedules are granular. A select few, for instance, dedicated impressive portions of their day to exercise—Charles Dickens, in particular, who spend more than two hours exercising each day, was a work out fiend. Others, meanwhile, managed to make their art or creative work despite spending a good deal of their time working a separate day job (see Kurt Vonnegut, Wolfgang Mozart, and Sigmund Freud).

What is Deliberate Practice?Shane Parrish: Despite repetition, most people fail to become experts at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it. Experience does not equate to expertise. [...] The talent argument, despite its popularity, is wrong. [...] Most of what we consider practice is really just playing around — we’re in our comfort zone.

Making It:

What we would want for ourselves is often the hardest thing to give others. Getting to making it work is a process -- and this is as valid for individuals as for organizations.

The Moral Bucket List. NYT: once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. [...]wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

Authenticity is an Evolving Process of Search and Discovery. Tim Kastelle: think about authenticity as a process, not a state. If “authentic” is something that you are, then it is hard to see how you can change, because that means becoming something that you currently are not.

Meryl Streep is highly relatable whether she's playing Julia Child, Karen Silkwood, Miranda Priestly, Donna Sheridan, or herself. “She's so good people don't really notice. I call her at the end of the day to find out how I did and inevitably it's one of the best days I've ever had,” says Ephron.

There is a little bit of us in each of Streep's complex characters. But it is still a limited pool of stories, pebbles in the vast expanse of superheros journeys. In cultural terms#, Americans share the unconscious assumption that the base unit of American culture is the individual. Studios, companies (including startups), and most event organizers continue to bet on that individual being male.

At the 2015 Women in the World Summit in New York City, legendary actress Meryl Streep talked about the abundance of male characters in art and history, saying she would rather be Peter Pan, not Tinkerbell or Wendy. Tom Sawyer, not Becky.

John Stewart asks about the challenges of breaking through in a male-dominated world. Streep says:

“A lot has to do with imagination and this active empathy women go through. From the time we're little girls we read all of literature, all of history. It's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or Wendy... I want to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky...

And we 're so used with that active empathizing of male-driven plot, and that's what we've done all of our lives... great literature, Shakespeare... it's all fellas.

They've never had to do the other thing. And the hardest thing, for me, as an actor, is to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like. That's a really hard thing. It's very hard for them to put themselves in the shoes of a female protagonist...

This is known to the studios, they know it's the toughest suit of clothes to wear.”

It's the reason why it is so hard to talk about feelings and communication in business environments. We could accomplish so much more, if we could connect with this idea that talking through issues with honesty and a desire to hear and see different points of view is an effective path to create better experiences.

Social psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathan Brown found that for the sake of our own well-being, we tend to be mostly optimistic about our abilities. This is a powerful habit because it typically forms the baseline of how we evaluate opportunities and make promises. If you've ever had a kitchen remodel you know what I'm talking about.

We can develop better habits -- for example, by dong a reality check of the average time and cost of kitchen remodels like ours. And willpower is the most important habit to build.

“Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

In a 2005 study, for instance, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164 eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self- discipline. Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools.

They had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not....Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.”

I continue to recommend this book because it helps with one of the most empowering things we can do -- and that is change our habits. See the review here.

“People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer.

When pit against other virtues, willpower comes out on top.

Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut). If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad place to start. To do this, we're going to have to ask a little more of our standard-equipped brains.”

According to Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain against the harder thing.

This part of the brain is divided into three main regions to take on the “I will” stick with it, “I won't” follow every little impulse or craving, and “I want” jobs. This last part is the smallest and the most important to tracking our real goals and desires.

Our self-control system has evolved more recently and we can use it to override automatic commands that drive us to do things that while alluring now are not so good for us in the long run.

We can help our future self by developing willpower, the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

If I could have a penny for every time someone told me that, I would have an empire today. It happened again today. This time I was running, uphill. More like sprinting, I am wired that way -- resistance can be used to good ends.

So there I was, running uphill, and a gentleman sitting on a comfy chair said from his porch, “you are going the wrong way,” he smiled when I passed him. My response was “you are right, I am.” I smiled back. Going with the flow is much easier. But being in flow is so much better. And I was in Flow, it was my alternate day circuit where I push toward the end of the six-miler -- so I was warmed up and approaching the finish line.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man with the unpronounceable name (for me), says about flow:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.

…

[Flow is] a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

…

[Flow lets people] achieve a joyous, self-forgetful involvement through concentration, which in turn is made possible by a discipline of the body.”

This is one of those occasions when doing the harder thing is easier in the long run. I am a long distance runner, it works for me. There are many others beyond athletic pursuits. Then again, one never knows, you could end up being chased or needing to catch the bus or a train in a hurry. Better be prepared.

I have a point with this story. Because the voice, that voice, is often that in our heads. We talk ourselves out of things before we are done. Often in the last mile (or less) to done. What happens then is we never learn what it's like to finish. We tell ourselves that it was not worth it, it was much harder than anticipated and we can conserve our energies for something else.

My working theory is that maybe we do it because we are afraid of making it. We have become accustomed to trying to make sense of things, we are even alright with making do -- fewer resources, more work, higher stress, etc. -- if only we can push through with what we have. And yet, yet... when pushing through is going to make the difference between draft and final, we let ourselves off the hook.

Our mental habits are the strongest to change. They are part of our DNA, the warm and cozy place we go to when things are a bit out of the ordinary. We live in extraordinary times, we have so much at our disposal. Yet all the tools in the world cannot make up for a bit of commitment and a generous helping of joy. We can redeploy the energy we often use to spin our wheels to build new strengths.

I'll be speaking about my journey at #dareconfUSA on May 19 and show a few techniques to help you learn how to:

make space for learning by letting go of habits that aren’t serving you well

ask for help and trust the learning process

experiment to discover what works for you

Dareconf for the first time in the U.S. with a program that will energize, entertain, inspire, and instigate you to find your flow. People skills matter more than ever, we can shape our experiences and learn to help ourselves get past things that are not serving us well and into flow. Get your ticket here.

“Today, about 1 in 9 American workers earns a living selling products or services. But new evidence suggests that the other 8 in 9 are spending a huge portion of their time selling in a broader sense – persuading, influencing, and moving others.”

And I believe it is because it captures the types of activities we engage in as modern workers and the new reality of work itself as the backdrop -- more freelancers, collaborations among peers, and loosely bound group -- then it is also true that the nature of our work requires more creativity. Creativity is a learned process, with steps, requiring cognitive stages, and built on existing ideas.

We copy, combine, collaborate our way into creativity. When we keep pushing, it is possible to find something that has not been done before. Regardless of where we are on the creative as process path, creative work is hard because we invest ourselves deeply in the doing and in how the product will be received.

Elizabeth Gilbert met with global success in her first book Eat, Pray, Love, the story of a transformational journey searching for pleasure and devotion through Italy, India, and Bali (likely you have seen the movie, starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem) suggests that we separate ourselves from our work:

“upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on.

[...]

The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.

The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.

[...] If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time.”

Gilbert is not the only writer and creative who has found a construct to separate the personal emotional investment from the act of creation. Choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about naming your Muse and so does writer Steven Pressfield.

We vest ourselves of the outcome, we pay less attention to the process -- and likely to doing the work -- and more to what Pressfield calls Resistance. The problem is history in not on our side:

“the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius.

[...]

It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun.”

It is bad for the ego -- as in make the ego bigger, a problem in many modern creative endeavors -- and for the end product. We end up working for the wrong reasons -- awards, accolades, etc. -- and performance suffers.

Being attached to the process, to doing the work, is a good attitude to have. Because external validation may or may not come. You could do the most brilliant work and if it is not timed right for the taste or the market, or the organization and people around you, well then. Gilbert has a way out of that. Her dialogue with the open air, the creative genius, is worth considering:

“Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal.

But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.”

One of the perks of being involved with Venture for America (VFA) and mentoring young professionals making a fresh start is meeting smart people who want to build things -- and help others do the same.

It was the case last week when we had our get together at First Round offices to learn more about the VFA Accelerator progress and the Fellows who are building businesses in Philadelphia.

we mean forming and helping companies and organizations that are innovating and creating value.

Starting with outlining the problem in the introduction, the book follows a logical outline.

Part I: where our talent is going is a review of the prestige pathways and how we have too much of a good thing. In why professional training cuts both ways, he says:

In the startup setting and in most small companies, the output is action-oriented. You're not an analyst; you're the operator. You need to get things done and make decisions, often with limited information and resources.

[...] for most small companies the value is in the execution. You push in a particular direction and find out if you're right in real time, and then change approaches accordingly. Mistakes are acceptable if they're the result of moving forward (whereas in the professional services context mistakes are regarded very negatively.)

Small experiments teach us much more than what works. They also teach us about ourselves -- our problem solving skills, appetite for risk, not to mention the oral and written communication practice in articulating what could work better to colleagues, peers, and (potential) investors. Says Yang:

If you want to solve a problem, you actually have to solve the problem.

We all could use better financial sense, opportunities to create, experience what it feels like to innovate and lead.

Part II is about building things. Until we experience it ourselves, we likely have no idea that building things is really hard. Contrary to belief, entrepreneurship is not about creativity. It's about organization building -- in other words, about people.

People focus way too much on the inspiration, but, like conception, having a good idea is not much of an accomplishment. You need the action and follow-through, which involves the right people, know-how, money, resources, and years of hard work.

He then proceeds to tell the stories of his own entrepreneurial ventures. What you need before you even get started is enough to discourage many. Chapters in this section include how to get better, running a company, and rent-seeking vs. value creation.

Part III is about solving the problem. The qualities we need, building a machine to fix the machine, how the future changes for at least a few, the teams of builders, the training camp, and notes from the field. See also this interview# on where can smart people have the greatest impact?

Appendix D of the book includes a very useful guide to determine what job traits are important to you. Starting with the two basic criteria summarized as “highly paid through work”, Yang adds a key question you should ask yourself before joining a company:

“Is this company on a growth path?”

My experience mirrors his. If the answer is yes, it will be a far more interesting and rewarding opportunity. The fifteen additional job traits to consider, also listed in TL;DR format, create a better detailed framework. You may not hit all, but a strong match with your top priorities will help you make a better decision.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.